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Features and Functions

The 323 review does a good job of describing most of the 343's features and you can find a description of the Download feature in the 321 review. Just remember that BitTorrent downloads are currently not supported, although D-Link told me that they are considering adding it, but don't have a definite schedule for doing so.

The 343 comes with UPnP enabled, so it will pop up an icon in the Windows Notification area (tray) if you have UPnP discovery enabled. But there is something funky in the UPnP code, because when I clicked on the icon to get to the admin web page, I frequently saw duplicate entries (Figure 3). These duplicates appear to be temporary and shrink down to a single entry after a few minutes or so, however.

Figure 3: Duplicate UPnP entries

RAID Options

The main thing that the 343 brings to the party is RAID 5 capability. Figure 4 shows that the 343 (along with the 321 and 323) allows you to create two volumes if you like using the Custom Configuration option. You just select the primary volume (RAID 0, 1 or 5), set its capacity and the remaining space will become a JBOD volume.

Figure 4: RAID Custom Configuration

There are two subtle oddities to the RAID options. First, RAID 0 isn't an option in the Basic RAID Configuration menu (Figure 5). You get RAID 0 only via the Custom Configuration.

Figure 5: RAID Basic Configuration

The other "hidden" option is that if you have four drives and select RAID 1 in the Basic Configuration menu, two separate RAID 1 volumes are automatically created. This acutally took me two tries, since formatting quit at the 94% point on the first try. So I shut down, rebooted and repeated the RAID 1 Basic Configuration selection and then got my two RAID 1 arrays.